Philadelphia - Comcast (NASD: CMCSA) late last week provided the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will additional information it requested regarding the company's new "protocol agnostic" network management practices, after it was sanctioned by the FCC for targeting the peer-to-peer traffic of some of its 14 million broadband subscribers. The company said its new network management technique "will identify which customer accounts are using the greatest amounts of bandwidth and their Internet traffic will be temporarily managed until the period of congestion passes."

"Customers will still be able to do anything they want to online, and many activities will be unaffected, but managed customers could experience things like: longer times to download or upload files, surfing the Web may seem somewhat slower, or playing games online may seem somewhat sluggish," Comcast said.

The company added that the management of subscribers' account usage will be temporary, "and it has nothing to do with aggregate monthly data usage"; Comcast recently announced that it will also impose a 250GB per month bandwidth cap on its residential customers.

"While we're pleased by the initial compliance, we note that Comcast is still pursuing its lawsuit against the FCC to throw out the ruling that forced this disclosure," said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press -- an advocacy group that had called for sanctions against Comcast's throttling of peer-to-peer applications.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/3srz2 (Comcast statement)

http://snipurl.com/3sryj (Reuters)

http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/update